George Washington

George Washington was a Virginia surveyor and planter who commanded the Continental Army for eight years, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and was the first president for two terms, refusing a third. He was the one man the founders trusted with power because he kept giving it back. The Farewell Address of 1796, drafted with Hamilton and Madison, warned against sectional loyalty, the spirit of party and permanent foreign alliances, and is read aloud in the Senate every year. The Harvard Classics print it with the First Inaugural. He freed the people he had enslaved in his will, the only founder from Virginia to do so.